Though only finger-sized, hamsi -- anchovies that come mostly from the Black Sea region -- loom large in the imagination of Turkish eaters. The little fish's arrival in late fall is greeted with great fanfare and some of the dishes that the humble hamsi is used in, such as a rice pilaf infused with spices and herbs, are treated with utter reverence.

Robyn Eckhardt, creator of the EatingAsia blog, has clearly caught the hamsi bug. In a wonderful piece that ran in yesterday's New York Times, Eckhardt describes a recent journey she made to Turkey's northern Black Sea coast in search of what turns out be an elusive catch. From her piece:

I was on a pilgrimage of sorts, inspired by an anchovy obsession, one shared by many Turks. For connoisseurs of hamsi, as anchovies are called in Turkish, the fat-padded specimens netted from the frigid Black Sea trump those taken from the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul and the Bosporus. The Black Sea season — which usually starts mid-autumn and runs through February — has been keenly anticipated for centuries. In the mid-1600s, the Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi wrote that in the port of Trabzon, on the coast’s eastern half, “fishmongers at the wharf ... have special trumpets made of elder-tree wood. They only have to blow on these trumpets once and, by God’s dispensation, if people praying in the mosque hear it, they will immediately leave their prayer and come running for the hamsi.” Today, locals settle for feasting on the fish as often as the season will allow, often twice a day at its height, when hamsi are as cheap as 3 Turkish lira (about $1.70) per kilo.

Driven by that sort of passion, my plan was a hamsi-fueled road trip along a 300-mile stretch of Turkey’s central Black Sea coast, with stops en route to sample the best of the catch, which turned out to be delicately seasonal — available one day, then not the next.

In the end, history, nostalgia and Istanbulites love for cream puffs covered in goopy chocolate sauce were not enough to stand up to the forces of development that have been rapidly changing the face of Turkey's largest city. This week, after a drawn out legal battle, the classic and well-loved sweets shop Inci -- which has long claimed to be the birthplace of the profiterole -- was finally shut down and evicted from the historic building it was housed in, which is set to be "restored" and turned into a shopping mall.

The 70-year-old Inci was most likely not the place where the profiterole was invented and probably didn't even have Istanbul's best version of the dish, but the old-school spot was nonetheless an institution, a culinary touchstone for tourists and locals alike and one of the last operating links to an older Istanbul that's quickly disappearing. On the Culinary Backstreets website, Ansel Mullins offers this eulogy for Inci:

For many, the mention of İnci wells up a sentimental memory of the first taste of something sweet in this classic patisserie, but for us, as non-local students of the area’s heritage, it always represented the last of public emblem of Beyoğlu’s non-Muslim community, a culture long on life support. Though the history of İnci – established in 1944 by a Greek migrant from Albania named Lucas Zigoridis (aka Luka Zigori) – is more recent than the late-19th-century heyday of the neighborhood, it was still a part of that tradition.

Do French merlots or German rieslings have Turkish ancestors? That's the intriguing proposition raised by a Swiss botanist, who, using DNA analysis, is arguing that many of the wine grapes used today in western Europe and other parts of the world descend from wild grape varieties domesticated by Stone Age farmers in what is now Turkey. Reports AFP:

Today Turkey is home to archaeological sites as well as vineyards of ancient grape varieties like Bogazkere and Okuzgozu, which drew the curiosity of the Swiss botanist and grape DNA sleuth Jose Vouillamoz, for the clues they may offer to the origin of European wine.
Together with the biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern, Vouillamoz has spent nearly a decade studying the world's cultivated and wild vines.
"We wanted to collect samples from wild and cultivated grape vines from the Near East -- that means southeastern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia -- to see in which place the wild grape was, genetically speaking, linked the closest to the cultivated variety."
"It turned out to be southeastern Anatolia," the Asian part of modern Turkey, said Vouillamoz, speaking at the EWBC wine conference in the Turkish city of Izmir this month. "We propose the hypothesis that it is most likely the first place of grape vine domestication."
McGovern's lab at the University of Pennsylvania Museum also provided archaeological evidence of wine's Anatolian roots after analysing residues of liquid recovered from vessels thousands of years old.
Author of "Uncorking the Past" and "Ancient Wine", McGovern used a sensitive chemical technique to look for significant amounts of tartaric acid -- for which grapes are the only source in the Middle East.

The pistachio may be the nut most people associate with Turkey, but in the country's northern Black Sea region, it's the hazelnut that rules. Turkey, in fact, is the world's largest producer of hazelnuts, and in the verdant Black Sea region the nut is a major driver of the local economy and an important part of the area's cuisine.

Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman, the team behind the indispensable EatingAsia blog, are currently traveling through the Black Sea region and have just filed a wonderful report about their hazelnut-oriented adventures. From their post:

Driving into Giresun from the east along the four-lane highway, we passed fındık fabrikası (hazelnut processing facility) after fındık fabrikası -- huge buildings, many with container trucks parked out front. In the city fındık depo tucked among houses and low-rise apartment buildings house hundreds of burlap bags of nuts in their shells, and shops with names like Hazelnut Castle and Hazelnut World sell all manner of hazelnut products: the nuts shelled and unshelled and dipped in chocolate, hazenut butter chunky or smooth, hazelnut flour and the big macaroon-type cookies that are made from it and hazelnut ezme, a sweet, sticky slurry of coarsely crushed hazelnuts blended withsyrup.

At Giresun's twice-weekly market, which draws fresh and prepared food vendors from villages near and far, we asked a husband-wife team selling whole dried pears, pear and apple pekmez (fruit molasses) and seven types of cheese why, given that the Black Sea hazelnut harvest was not all that many weeks ago, there were no hazelnuts for sale at the market.

In what may be a somewhat questionable act of architectural preservation, Baku's historic Sabunchu rail station, a Moorish-influeneced stone structure built in 1926, now has the distinction of the being largest fried chicken shack on the planet. Opened with great fanfare -- check out the this YouTube video from the restaurant's high voltage ribbon-cutting ceremony last month, -- this latest KFC outpost was reportedly built with an investment of 3 million euros, used to restore the railway station, which had been falling apart after years of neglect.

Considering the glee with which Azeri officials are bulldozing historic parts of Baku in order to make way for ever-taller buildings, the opening of this new monster KFC may ultimately be a good thing. Azerbaijan, that land of ironic twists, may be one of the few places in the world where turning a classic railway station into a fried chicken restaurant may actually be considered a step in a positive direction.

After six years of living with an onerous embargo, will Russian consumers soon be able to again get their fix of Borjomi mineral water and sweet Khvanchkara wine from Georgia? Statements coming out from both Moscow and Tbilisi make it sound like that could be the case.

"Russia and Georgia are ready to solve practically the issue of returning Georgian wine into the Russian market. The supply of Georgian wine into Russia was banned in 2006", Andrey Denisov, Russia's First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, was quoted as saying earlier this week.

“We are talking about the restoring the position of Georgian winemaking in our market. At least the both sides are ready to solve the issue.”

Meanwhile, according to the state-run Voice of Russia website, Georgia's Minister of Agriculture, David Kirvalidze, yesterday said his country is ready to negotiate with Moscow in order to enable Georgian wine and mineral water to return to Russian supermarket shelves.

Reporting on these developments, the Independent suggests that what is likely helping along this wine detente between Moscow and Tbilisi are the results of last month's Georgian Parliamentary elections:

In Georgian parliamentary elections last month, the party of pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili was defeated by a coalition led by Bizdina Ivanishvili, a zebra-keeping billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and has promised to improve relations between the two countries. One of the first steps could be the return of the wine trade.

Writing in the International Herald Tribune's Latitude blog, veteran Turkey correspondent Andrew Finkel describes how he recently found out that one of his favorite kebab restaurants recently stopped serving booze. Rather than due to political pressure, it turns out the owner made a business decision: in the part of town where the restaurant was located, many locals will no longer frequent an establishment that serves alcohol.

But Finkel points out that while that restaurant owner's clientele may be shunning booze, a number of well-to-do Turks are investing their time and money in projects that are supporting a small boom in Turkey's wine industry. Writes Finkel:

In all, there some 800 varieties of grape in Turkey, 30 of which are cultivated commercially. The country is the sixth-largest producer of grapes, but most end up eaten as is or as raisins. Only 3 percent are turned into wine. For now.

“Small wineries are transforming the whole industry,” says Isa Bal, the head sommelier of The Fat Duck, the three Michelin star restaurant in Berkshire, who was named Best Sommelier in Europe in 2008. Originally from Adana, a city in southern Turkey known for its pickled red carrot juice, Bal describes a Turkey on the brink of discovering the finer things.

At the moment, for most Turks the good life means owning a house and a car. Bal predicts that in time it will mean “sealing a business deal over lunch with a good wine.”

I, for one, was further reassured over lunch in Urla, about 20 miles from Izmir, at another state-of-the-art winery run by Can Ortabas, who took up growing grapes after he discovered ancient sets of vineyards on his land. Ortabas is not worried that Turkey might turn into Iran.

Walking into Tashkent's Affresco Restaurant recently, I could have been entering an upscale Italian establishment just about anywhere. The inviting dining area, equipped with comfortable leather chairs and polished wooden tables, is decorated with copies of famous frescoes. On the serving counter stands a vintage copper and brass espresso machine; bottles of Italian wine adorn the bar.

In the basement, however, a whole other world awaits very important clientele. The restaurant sent local artist Bobur Ismoilov on an inspiration-seeking trip to Italy. Upon his return, he let his imagination run wild, decorating a series of VIP rooms according to a hodgepodge of Italian themes and clichés.

The walls of one room, for example, are adorned with black and white photos of singers and actors from yesteryear – stars like Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and, of course, Frank Sinatra – wolfing down plates of spaghetti. Another room features a mural showing a traditional Sicilian street scene.

Things start to get strange, however, when you enter the “Mafia Room,” which is decked with mug shots of infamous Mafioso figures and posters from Hollywood gangster classics such The Godfather and Donnie Brasco.

But the pièce de résistance is the clammy VIP chamber that recreates Al Capone's Alcatraz cell. It’s the full prison experience: The room’s metal door is made of bars, from which dangle a pair of handcuffs. There’s also a red velvet couch.

Affresco's menu tends toward standard Italian fare, but cooked with more accomplishment than is usually achieved in Central Asia's Italian eateries. The prices are higher than average for Tashkent, but the food -- homemade pastas, hearty risottos and crisp pizzas -- is quality.

Istanbul is often billed as the city where “East meets West,” but to many it is a place where those geographies pass each other on the way in and out of town. Afghans, Iranians, sub-Saharan Africans, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Armenians, Filipinos and many other nationalities end up in Istanbul struggling to get by or move on. Though not always understood and much less frequently welcomed, the migrant communities of Istanbul represent significant cultural diversity and could make a much greater contribution to the city’s cosmopolitan culture, if embraced.

In Kurtuluş where the streets start sloping down toward Dolapdere, there are enough African migrants to make up an entire soccer league. In Kumkapı, call center windows are plastered with tiny flags and by-the-minute rates for phone calls to dozens of countries. Follow your nose through these neighborhoods and you may find a big lunch of injera and dibs taking place in one of the many makeshift community centers tucked into the middle floors of a building. Though struggling, these communities survive and the simple act of cooking the food of their homeland, day by day, helps to hold them together. One migrant cook told us that cooking helps you to “forget where you are.”

A month after a law restricting alcohol sales in Uzbekistan came into force, trade in beer, wine and spirits – over the counter at least – has dried up in downtown Tashkent.

Where the city used to be scattered with small shops selling alcohol, only a handful remain since the law designed to safeguard the nation’s health took effect on October 1.

The law bans sales of alcohol and cigarettes within a 500-meter radius of schools, places of worship and sports facilities. That rules out just about any spot in Tashkent and other towns, “despondent” alcohol traders have pointed out to the independent Uznews.net website.

A stroll around downtown Tashkent reveals that many stores that used to sell the demon drink have shut down or changed their trade. A handful of alcohol stores remain in the city center (some of which appear to be remarkably close to schools). Not surprisingly, those still in business are doing a brisk trade.

Implementation of the law seems patchy: Uznews.net found many alcohol stores still in business earlier this month, and there is anecdotal evidence that some stores sell alcohol under the counter. Restaurants, bars and nightclubs are not covered by the ban.

Trade in cigarettes seems unaffected: They remain on sale in shops and at stalls all over Tashkent. For anti-smoking campaigners, the law looks like a missed opportunity, prohibiting smoking in “places of work” but stopping short of a ban in restaurants and bars.

About Kebabistan

For many of us, the real action in Eurasia is happening in the region’s kitchens. From noodles in Kyrgyzstan to doner in Turkey and everything else edible in between, Kebabistan brings you the latest developments in Eurasia’s food culture.

About The Author

Kebabistan is written by Yigal Schleifer, a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. Between 2002 and 2010 he was based in Istanbul, where he worked as a correspondent for EurasiaNet, covering Turkey and the surrounding region. Schleifer is the co-creator of IstanbulEats.com, a guide to Istanbul's "culinary backstreets" and also one of the authors of the 2009 Fodor's guide to Turkey.

Feedback

We would like to hear your opinion about the new site. Tell us what you like, and what you don't like in an email and send it to: info@eurasianet.org